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1/19/08 3:16 PM Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs? - New York Times
Page 3 of 5 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/science/15brain.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all
irregularities out of what is now the observable universe and endowing primordial chaos
with order.
Inflation is a veritable cosmological fertility principle. Fluctuations in the field driving
inflation also would have seeded the universe with the lumps that eventually grew to be
galaxies, stars and people. According to the more extended version, called eternal
inflation, an endless array of bubble or pocket universes are branching off from one
another at a dizzying and exponentially increasing rate. They could have different
properties and perhaps even different laws of physics, so the story goes.
A different, but perhaps related, form of antigravity, glibly dubbed dark energy, seems to
be running the universe now, and that is the culprit responsible for the Boltzmann
brains.
The expansion of the universe seems to be accelerating, making galaxies fly away from
one another faster and faster. If the leading dark-energy suspect, a universal repulsion
Einstein called the cosmological constant, is true, this runaway process will last forever,
and distant galaxies will eventually be moving apart so quickly that they cannot
communicate with one another. Being in such a space would be like being surrounded by
a black hole.
Rather than simply going to black like The Sopranos conclusion, however, the cosmic
horizon would glow, emitting a feeble spray of elementary particles and radiation, with a
temperature of a fraction of a billionth of a degree, courtesy of quantum uncertainty.
That radiation bath will be subject to random fluctuations just like Boltzmanns eternal
universe, however, and every once in a very long, long time, one of those fluctuations
would be big enough to recreate the Big Bang. In the fullness of time this process could
lead to the endless series of recurring universes. Our present universe could be part of
that chain.
In such a recurrent setup, however, Dr. Susskind of Stanford, Lisa Dyson, now of the
University of California, Berkeley, and Matthew Kleban, now at New York University,
pointed out in 2002 that Boltzmanns idea might work too well, filling the megaverse
with more Boltzmann brains than universes or real people.
In the same way the odds of a real word showing up when you shake a box of Scrabble
letters are greater than a whole sentence or paragraph forming, these regular universes
would be vastly outnumbered by weird ones, including flawed variations on our own all
the way down to naked brains, a result foreshadowed by Martin Rees, a cosmologist at
the University of Cambridge, in his 1997 book, Before the Beginning.
The conclusions of Dr. Dyson and her colleagues were quickly challenged by Andreas
Albrecht and Lorenzo Sorbo of the University of California, Davis, who used an alternate
approach. They found that the Big Bang was actually more likely than Boltzmanns brain.
In the end, inflation saves us from Boltzmanns brain, Dr. Albrecht said, while
admitting that the calculations were contentious. Indeed, the invasion of Boltzmann
brains, as Dr. Linde once referred to it, was just beginning.
In an interview Dr. Linde described these brains as a form of reincarnation. Over the
course of eternity, he said, anything is possible. After some Big Bang in the far future, he
said, its possible that you yourself will re-emerge. Eventually you will appear with your
table and your computer.
But its more likely, he went on, that you will be reincarnated as an isolated brain,
without the baggage of stars and galaxies. In terms of probability, he said, Its cheaper.
You might wonder whats wrong with a few brains or even a preponderance of them
floating around in space. For one thing, as observers these brains would see a freaky
chaotic universe, unlike our own, which seems to persist in its promise and
disappointment.
1/19/08 3:16 PM Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs? - New York Times
Page 4 of 5 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/science/15brain.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all
Another is that one of the central orthodoxies of cosmology is that humans dont occupy
a special place in the cosmos, that we and our experiences are typical of cosmic beings. If
the odds of us being real instead of Boltzmann brains are one in a million, say, waking
up every day would be like walking out on the street and finding everyone in the city
standing on their heads. You would expect there to be some reason why you were the
only one left right side up.
Some cosmologists, James Hartle and Mark Srednicki, of the University of California,
Santa Barbara, have questioned that assumption. For example, Dr. Hartle wrote in an
e-mail message, on Earth humans are not typical animals; insects are far more
numerous. No one is surprised by this.
In an e-mail response to Dr. Hartles view, Don Page of the University of Alberta, who
has been a prominent voice in the Boltzmann debate, argued that what counted
cosmologically was not sheer numbers, but consciousness, which we have in abundance
over the insects. I would say that we have no strong evidence against the working
hypothesis that we are typical and that our observations are typical, he explained,
which is very fruitful in science for helping us believe that our observations are not just
flukes but do tell us something about the universe.
Dr. Dyson and her colleagues suggested that the solution to the Boltzmann paradox was
in denying the presumption that the universe would accelerate eternally. In other words,
they said, that the cosmological constant was perhaps not really constant. If the
cosmological constant eventually faded away, the universe would revert to normal
expansion and what was left would eventually fade to black. With no more acceleration
there would be no horizon with its snap, crackle and pop, and thus no material for
fluctuations and Boltzmann brains.
String theory calculations have suggested that dark energy is indeed metastable and will
decay, Dr. Susskind pointed out. The success of ordinary cosmology, Dr. Susskind said,
speaks against the idea that the universe was created in a random fluctuation.
But nobody knows whether dark energy if it dies will die soon enough to save the
universe from a surplus of Boltzmann brains. In 2006, Dr. Page calculated that the dark
energy would have to decay in about 20 billion years in order to prevent it from being
overrun by Boltzmann brains.
The decay, if and when it comes, would rejigger the laws of physics and so would be fatal
and total, spreading at almost the speed of light and destroying all matter without
warning. There would be no time for pain, Dr. Page wrote: And no grieving survivors
will be left behind. So in this way it would be the most humanely possible execution.
But the object of his work, he said, was not to predict the end of the universe but to
draw attention to the fact that the Boltzmann brain problem remains.
People have their own favorite measures of probability in the multiverse, said Raphael
Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley. So Boltzmann brains are just one
example of how measures can predict nonsense; anytime your measure predicts that
something we see has extremely small probability, you can throw it out, he wrote in an
e-mail message.
Another contentious issue is whether the cosmologists in their calculations could
consider only the observable universe, which is all we can ever see or be influenced by,
or whether they should take into account the vast and ever-growing assemblage of other
bubbles forever out of our view predicted by eternal inflation. In the latter case, as Alex
Vilenkin of Tufts University pointed out, The numbers of regular and freak observers are
both infinite. Which kind predominate depends on how you do the counting, he said..
In eternal inflation, the number of new bubbles being hatched at any given moment is
always growing, Dr. Linde said, explaining one such counting scheme he likes. So the
evolution of people in new bubbles far outstrips the creation of Boltzmann brains in old
ones. The main way life emerges, he said, is not by reincarnation but by the creation of
new parts of the universe. So maybe we dont need to care too much about the
1/19/08 3:16 PM Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs? - New York Times
Page 5 of 5 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/science/15brain.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all
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new parts of the universe. So maybe we dont need to care too much about the
Boltzmann brains, he said.
If you are reincarnated, why do you care about where you are reincarnated? he asked.
It sounds crazy because here we are touching issues we are not supposed to be touching
in ordinary science. Can we be reincarnated?
People are not prepared for this discussion, Dr. Linde said.
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